Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, in the Waxhaws region on the North/South Carolina border to Scots-Irish immigrants. His father died three weeks before his birth, and his mother Elizabeth died of cholera while nursing American prisoners of war during the Revolution. At thirteen he served as a Patriot courier; refusing to polish a British officer's boots, he was slashed with a saber, leaving scars on his left hand and head. The Revolution killed every member of his immediate family and left him with a lifelong loathing of what he called British aristocracy and political privilege.

Self-taught, Jackson was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1787 and moved to frontier Nashville. He served in the U.S. House (1796) and Senate (1797), then as a Tennessee Superior Court judge from 1798. He built the Hermitage plantation, where his slaveholdings grew from nine in 1804 to over 150 at his death, and roughly 300 over his lifetime. As major general of the Tennessee militia he crushed the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend in March 1814, imposing the Treaty of Fort Jackson that took 23 million acres from the Creek nation. His decisive victory at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815 (fought after the Treaty of Ghent was signed but before news reached the front) inflicted some 2,000 British casualties against 71 American, making him a national hero and earning him the nickname Old Hickory.

In the 1824 election Jackson won a plurality of the popular and electoral vote but lost the House contingent election to John Quincy Adams when Henry Clay threw his support behind Adams; Jackson's supporters denounced this as a corrupt bargain. Over the next four years they built the new Democratic Party, and in 1828 Jackson defeated Adams decisively. His wife Rachel died of a heart attack on December 22, 1828, two months before the inauguration; Jackson blamed Adams's partisans for hastening her death and never forgave them. At his March 1829 inauguration a celebrating crowd overran the White House, earning him the nickname King Mob. Jackson placed his political identity firmly with the common man and institutionalised the spoils system, removing roughly ten percent of federal officeholders to replace them with loyalists.

Jackson's presidential legacy is sharply divided. He signed the Indian Removal Act in May 1830, leading to the forced relocation of the Five Civilized Tribes; the Cherokee Trail of Tears, executed under his successor Van Buren in 1838, killed thousands. When the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that Georgia could not extend its laws into Cherokee territory, Jackson declined to enforce the decision. During the 1832 nullification crisis he sharply rejected South Carolina's claim to nullify federal tariffs, threatening military force and influencing Lincoln's later defense of the Union. He waged war on the Second Bank of the United States, which he called a fourth branch of government run by elites; his 1832 veto message and removal of federal deposits dismantled the Bank by 1836. Famously he told Van Buren the Bank was trying to kill him but he would kill it. The aggressive expansion of presidential veto and removal powers earned him the Whig nickname King Andrew. In January 1835 he paid off the national debt, the only time in U.S. history this was accomplished, and that same month survived the first assassination attempt on a sitting U.S. president when Richard Lawrence's two pistols both misfired. He left office in 1837 and died at the Hermitage on June 8, 1845, of tuberculosis, dropsy and heart failure at age 78.